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I’ve been slowly making my way through the Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, which is less of an endurance contest than reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary, to be sure.  I’m dividing the interesting entries up into categories, the first of which are the cute ones that make early 20th-century criminals seem like adorable ragamuffins.  Keep in mind that there are an enormous number of offensive and scary terms I won’t be posting at all.

I cross-referenced the online OED for all the terms and indicated if it was found with an identical or related meaning.

Axeman: a prison barber

Beagles: sausages

Cackle-factory: insane asylum

Camisole: a strait jacket [OED, c. 1881]

Chatterer: machine gun

Die: to leave the underworld and go straight

Diver: one who robs drunkards [OED: pickpocket, through 1887]

Dream gum: opium

Eel: a slippery and unprincipled fellow [OED: U.S. A nickname for a New Englander. c. 1840]

Eye-wash: tear gas

Fourth of July: a gun fight

Get out the crying towel: “stop complaining”

Giggle academy: insane asylum [OED: giggle-house Austral. and N.Z. slang c. 1919]

To have go-go in one’s eyes: to be determined to escape from prison

Googs: eyeglasses

Grab scenery: to ride the top of a freight car (”Hobo”)

Griddle: to interrogate ['grill' is not listed but the OED shows it already in common usage]

Some friends of mine picked up this volume at a used bookstore while on vacation and we had a lot of fun reading through it.  It’s “bilingual,” so the first half defines thousands of slang terms and phrases, while the second half advises you on what to call a cemetery (bone-orchard), how to affectionately describe the electric chair (old monkey), and tips on how to resist (stick and slug) arrest (booby-pinch).

When vacation ended, they were kind enough to let me have it (after much whining) because I wanted to post interesting entries online.  But was it still in copyright?

Here’s the citation:

Goldin, Hyman E., Frank O’Leary, and Morris Lipsius, eds. Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo, New York: Twayne, 1950.

When I got the book home I looked up Twayne (they’re now owned by Gale/Cengage), and checked their online catalog.  It wasn’t in there, but that only means it’s out of print, not out of copyright.

Enter yesterday’s release of U.S. copyright renewals by the Google Books team. Since the dictionary was published between 1923 and 1963, the absence of its appearance in the renewals data strongly suggests that it’s public domain.  Not so strongly that I’d just grab the content and re-print it, but enough that I feel comfortable posting some excerpts here now and then.

This time, we’ll start with the “Advisory Board”:

1. Bad Bill - arrested on a variety of criminal pursuits
2. Big Department - extortionist, police impersonator, jewel thief among the NYC elite
3. Bubbles - robber, forger and burglar
4. Butch - bank robber, strike breaker, election fraud boss, car thief, pinball and slot-machine operator
5. Chink - purse-snatcher, safe-robber and armed holdup man
6. Chop Chop - strong-arm terrorist [sic], burglar and robber
7. Dippo - pickpocket from age 14 to 39
8. Duke - pickpock, con man, carnival thief
9. Hal the Rebel - various
10. Iggy - robber, carnival thief, con man
11. Jo Jo - robber and burglar
12. Red Mack - robber and burglar
13. Slim - counterfeiter and forger
14. Stubs - larcenist, forger and swingler
15. The Colonel - con man ["He requests that no further details be made public"]